Georgia Wrongful Death Lawyer

If you are reading this, something has happened that no amount of legal information is going to help with. We know that. This page exists because families in the first weeks after a death get asked to make decisions — about paperwork, about insurance, about who speaks for whom — long before anyone feels ready, and because the answers are hard to find when you most need them.

There is no rush on your end. There is often a rush on theirs. An insurance company may make contact quickly, sometimes within days, with sympathy and an offer and a form to sign. That timing is not a coincidence.

Do not sign anything from an insurance company, and do not give a recorded statement, before you have spoken to a lawyer. A release signed in the first month usually cannot be undone, and families often sign one before anyone has explained what Georgia law actually entitles them to.

These claims sit within our catastrophic injury practice. What follows is the part families tell us they wish someone had explained at the start.

What Georgia Means by the Full Value of the Life

Georgia measures a wrongful death claim by the full value of the life of the person who died — valued from their point of view, not by what the family lost financially. It has two halves: the economic worth of the life, and the intangible worth of simply living it. Georgia does not deduct what the deceased would have spent on their own upkeep.

That last point is the one families are never told, and it is unusual. In many states a wrongful death recovery is reduced by the deceased person’s own living expenses, on the reasoning that the family would never have seen that money anyway. Georgia does not do that. The measure is the value of the life as a whole.

In plain terms: a Georgia jury is not asked how much money the family lost. It is asked what the life was worth. Those are different questions producing very different numbers, and the second one is what the law requires.

The intangible half has no invoice and no formula. It covers the ordinary substance of a life — being present, doing the work, raising the children, the Sunday routines, the person’s own enjoyment of their own days. Establishing it means showing a jury who somebody actually was, which is why we ask families to tell us about their person and not only about the accident.

Why There Are Two Separate Claims After a Death

One death in Georgia can produce two distinct legal claims, brought by different people and paying for different losses. The wrongful death claim belongs to the surviving family and covers the value of the life. The estate’s claim — called a survival action — covers what the person themselves went through and was billed for before they died.

Families are frequently told about one and not the other, and the money lands in different places.

	Wrongful death claim	Estate claim (survival action)
Who brings it	The surviving family, in the statutory order	The personal representative of the estate
What it pays for	The full value of the life of the person who died	Pain and suffering before death, medical bills, funeral and burial costs
Who receives the money	The surviving family members directly	The estate — then distributed under the will or by law
Whose loss it measures	The value of the life itself	What the person endured between the injury and the death

A personal representative is simply the person a court appoints to act for the estate — often the same family member, but wearing a different hat and with different duties.

Where death was not immediate, the estate’s claim can be substantial on its own. It is also the one most likely to be missed, because it requires opening an estate and having someone appointed — a separate legal step from the wrongful death claim. Neither should be settled without knowing what the other is worth.

Who Has the Right to Bring the Claim?

Georgia sets a statutory order for who may bring a wrongful death claim. It is a hierarchy, not a choice: the surviving spouse comes first, then the children, then the parents, then the estate. The right belongs to whoever sits highest in that order, and the recovery is shared according to rules set by law rather than by agreement within the family.

Order	Who may bring the claim	Notes
First	Surviving spouse	Brings the claim on behalf of any surviving children as well
Second	Surviving children	Where there is no surviving spouse
Third	Surviving parents	Where there is no spouse and no child
Fourth	Administrator of the estate	Where none of the above survive; recovery is held for the next of kin

The spouse’s share has a floor. Where a surviving spouse brings the claim alongside children, the spouse’s portion cannot fall below one third of the total, however many children there are. Without that rule a large family could reduce a surviving husband or wife to a fraction.

Two situations cause the most difficulty and both are worth raising early. Where a child is a minor, a court generally has to approve and protect their share rather than the money simply being handed over. And where a family is not straightforward — a separation that was never finalized, children from more than one relationship, a long-term partner who was never married to the person who died — the statutory order can produce a result nobody expected. That is a conversation to have before anything is filed.

How Long Does a Family Have to File?

Georgia generally gives two years from the date of death to file a wrongful death lawsuit. Several things change that — an unprobated estate, a pending criminal prosecution, a claim against a government body, or a death caused by medical care. Some extend the window and some cut it sharply, so the deadline applying to your family is worth confirming early.

Situation	Effect on the deadline
Standard wrongful death claim	2 years from the date of death
The estate has not been probated	May be paused, subject to an outer limit
The death is being prosecuted as a crime	May be paused until the prosecution concludes
Claim against a city or municipal corporation	Short written notice required first — treat as months
Claim against a county or the State of Georgia	Written notice required first, on a shorter clock than the lawsuit
Death caused by medical care	Separate limits apply, including an outer cut-off

Waiting for the criminal case is the most common and most costly mistake. Families are often told, sometimes by people in authority, to let the prosecution finish first. Criminal and civil matters run on separate tracks with separate deadlines. A prosecution can take years, evidence degrades while it does, and nobody is protecting the family’s civil rights in the meantime.

Where the death followed medical care, the deadlines work differently again and sit on top of a filing requirement no other claim has — set out on our medical malpractice page.

What Kinds of Deaths Give Rise to a Claim?

A wrongful death claim arises whenever a death was caused by someone else’s negligence, by a defective product, or by a criminal act. The underlying facts decide how the case is built and who can be held responsible — a highway crash, a fall on unsafe property, a workplace failure and a hospital error are proved in entirely different ways.

• Crashes — cars, commercial trucks, motorcycles, and collisions involving pedestrians or cyclists. See our motor vehicle accident pages.
• Unsafe property and workplaces — falls, structural failures, and deaths on the job, which may involve both a workers’ compensation claim and a separate claim against a third party. See premises and workplace injury.
• Medical care — surgical error, missed diagnosis, medication error, or oxygen deprivation.
• A survivable injury that later proved fatal — including deaths following a severe traumatic brain injury, where the estate’s claim for the period of suffering can be significant.

Georgia’s comparative negligence rule applies here as elsewhere. If the person who died is found to bear some share of the fault, the recovery is reduced by that share, and there is no recovery at all if their share reaches 50%. Expect an insurer to look for that argument — and expect it to be made about someone who is no longer able to answer it.

How Georgia’s 2025 Tort Changes Affect These Cases

Georgia changed its civil justice rules in 2025 through Senate Bill 68. Several changes reach wrongful death cases directly, and two matter enough that families should know they exist: new rules allowing certain trials to be split into stages, and new restrictions on how lawyers may argue the value of losses that carry no dollar figure.

Splitting the trial. A case can now, in some circumstances, be heard in separate phases — one deciding responsibility, another deciding the amount. For a family that means the story of what happened and the story of who was lost may be told to the jury at different times rather than as one account.

Arguing the value of the life. There are new limits on how a dollar figure for non-economic loss may be put to a jury. In wrongful death the intangible value of the life is the heart of the claim, so how it may be argued is not a procedural detail — it goes to the center of the case.

None of this removes a family’s right to bring a claim, and none of it changes the full value measure itself. What it changes is how a case has to be prepared, and it means anyone comparing your situation to a case resolved a few years ago is working from rules that no longer apply.

Working With Kenneth S. Nugent, P.C.

Nothing up front, and nothing until we win. We work on contingency — the fee comes out of the recovery at a percentage agreed in writing before we begin. No retainer and no hourly billing, which matters in a household that has just lost an income.

Kenneth S. Nugent, P.C. has represented Georgia families since 1980 — more than 300,000 clients and over $5 billion recovered across forty-five years. Nine offices around the state: Albany, Athens, Augusta, Columbus, Macon, Savannah, Valdosta, Duluth and Atlanta. When you call, you reach the firm’s attorneys directly.

Much of the early work here is practical rather than legal — opening the estate, working out who has authority to act, dealing with the bills that keep arriving. We can take that on so your family is not doing it in the middle of grieving.

Do not sign anything from an insurance company before you talk to a lawyer. Not a release, not a settlement, not an authorization for records. There is no deadline in the next few weeks that requires you to sign anything, whatever you are being told.